Amber Pasztor had already decided she was going to kill her children. But she asked them what they wanted, she said.

"I gave them a choice," she said in an interview with Fort Wayne, Ind., television station WANE-TV. "That they could live, traumatized like their mom, or they can go to heaven with God and be better off."

She smothered her daughter first, she said. Then her son.

"He wanted to go with her," she said.

Pasztor, the mother at the center of a September Amber Alert, detailed the day she abducted and killed her two young children during the interview via a jail telephone with WANE reporter Brett Thomas.

Pasztor, 29, admitted to smothering and killing her two children, 7-year-old Liliana Hernandez and 6-year-old Rene Pasztor, after abducting them from a Fort Wayne residence Sept. 26.

She later drove a stolen car to the Elkhart (Ind.) Police Department, where she flagged down an officer and told him her children were dead in the back seat.

She said she was in Michigan when she first heard the Amber Alert had been issued, she said in the interview. That's when she made the decision to kill her children.

She told WANE she "didn't have the heart" to shoot them, so she smothered them instead. She previously revealed to Elkhart police how she used her hands to smother them, demonstrating how she covered their mouths and noses until they stopped breathing.

They made the "choice," she said, but still they fought back as she smothered them.

The children died of asphyxiation, according to the Elkhart County coroner, and their deaths were ruled homicides. Pasztor faces two charges of murder.

In the interview, she revealed how she pushed open the door of her father's home, took the children and started driving in the car she had stolen from her neighbor, Frank Macomber.

Macomber, 65, was found fatally shot in a wooded area in Fort Wayne the day after Pasztor was arrested. She admitted to WANE that she also had killed him, but she has not been charged in connection with his death.

Pasztor told WANE she had come up with the plan days before, when she planned to go camping and have sex with Macomber. She admitted to shooting him once with his own gun before stealing his car. She said she got rid of the gun in a river in Michigan.

Pasztor told WANE she killed her children to keep them safe.

“They were in good hands, but I don’t think they were safe,” she said. “My kids are in a better place ... they’re in heaven now. They don’t have no worries no more.”